A federal jobs guarantee must be administered by the Department of Labor.

What would a federal job guarantee program look like? The program would be administered by the Department of Labor and overseen by the Secretary of Labor. The Secretary and Department of Labor will be charged with working in conjunction with other agencies, and states and localities to identify an inventory of public infrastructure tasks and associated jobs.

1. Jobs to support state and local governments. State and local governments account for most of the government employment in the United States, and they comprise an important part of our federalist system. In a range of policy domains – public health, education and job training, infrastructure, health provision and conservation – it is state and local governments that have the legal authorities and historical capacities to act. Yet state governments also have the weakest capacity to respond to an economic crisis. First, state governments have nothing like the Federal Reserve to back their debt (this is one among several reasons that the Federal Reserve has recently been looking into mass purchases of municipal bonds). They cannot print money. Second, state governments lack the expansive revenue-generating capacity of the federal government. Beyond this, state governments have in recent decades constrained their powers with balanced budget amendments, while a number of states (Illinois and Connecticut are two examples) have badly underfunded pension systems, and still others have tethered their income to commodity (especially petroleum) sales, which are at historically low prices and whose price declines have damaged state revenues.

Workers and some capital costs for projects at the local, county, or state levels can be funded in a way to provide regional full employment and infrastructure needs. The projects and areas with the greatest needs could be cued to receive the federal intervention sooner. The Department of Labor would work closely with local governments. Local and state governments would, in conjunction with community organizations, develop project proposals to address local infrastructure needs, similar to the local, state, and federal collaborations in the design of direct government employment programs of the New Deal. Localities are likely most aware of the infrastructure needs to offer the greatest benefit to their communities. In order to minimize inequality across states and reduce the burden of discrimination, the workers under this program would be federally employed but would be tasked or apportioned (perhaps by formula, to reduce near-term political discretion) to states according to their economic, public health, and infrastructure needs. Even if the work occurs at the state and local level, the federal government needs to step in to provide the jobs, and there are a range of tools it has to do so. The traditional tool consists of program-specific block grants that have been an important feature of American government since the New Deal and especially the Nixon era. The problem with these grants is that they often permit state and local officials to withhold important resources from populations in need, as occurred with so many states’ refusal to take Medicaid expansions under the Affordable Care Act. Our proposal would build upon the strengths of grants by making the jobs available to states and local governments, but would address the inequality-related weakness of these programs by making the employees federal workers who, as such, are made available to state and local governments. In order to avoid potentially unconstitutional imposition of requirements upon state governments (which were declared unconstitutional in NFIB v. Sebelius (2012)), the federal government could offer these jobs as an option, as it did with Medicaid expansion in the Affordable Care Act. Another alternative is to allow state and localities to develop a bank of proposals for physical and human infrastructure from which a federal authority (operating under formulaic or discretionary procedures) can prioritize with regards to urgent and useful needs. The state and localities can even administer the program with federal oversight, however, the workers would be ultimately employed by the federal government, as opposed to state or local employees by way of a federal grant. 2. Jobs to support federal agencies. Direct government hiring by federal agencies would be essential for many reasons. First, in a polarized political environment, it is quite possible that some states may obstruct cooperation with federal government employment. Having a robust program of federal hiring, including directly in uncooperative states, would broaden the distribution of benefits and mechanize the mandate for guaranteed employment. The federal government has a well-established personnel system that has expanded before: witness the mobilization of government employment after the September 11th, 2001 terrorist attacks, including the creation of a new Cabinet-level department and the launching of new agencies such as the Transportation Security Agency (TSA). Congress should both create new federal programs and fund federal agencies to expand existing programs. The kinds of programs can and should be shaped by the imperative social, political, and economic needs of the American republic.

What kinds of programs and what kinds of jobs make the most sense?

Public health infrastructure. The news that we get on a daily basis on COVID-19 comes largely from the numbers collected by state health departments, agencies that are usually invisible but ever a bulwark against the most daunting health threats. Yet state and local health agencies have shed capacity since the 1980s. Then came the Great Recession. From an already weakened state, the American public health system has lost 55,000 jobs since 2008. Reliable estimates suggest that the deficit in American public health infrastructure amounts to at least 250,000 additional jobs. An assertive program of public hiring would include nurses, physicians, epidemiologists, health care aides, mental health professionals, social workers, health clinic administrators, workers to perform contact tracing for this and future pandemics, and building services workers like janitors.

Rebuild our crumbling cities. Urban infrastructure would be an important part of any American rebuilding effort, but key to rebuilding America’s cities would be to invest in the public hospitals, health clinics, schools, and libraries (including informatics and digital training centers) that would promote both civic engagement and human capital formation. Construction jobs alone to build the new buildings and renew the older ones required for first rate public health, education, and library systems in cities and towns could provide hundreds of thousands of jobs, with many more in buildings operations and maintenance. Funding these positions would also allow governments to target black and brown communities and lower resourced communities in general who have traditionally been passed by in government employment programs.

Expansion of rural programs through augmented postal services. The post office is the branch of government that Americans probably know best, with offices in essentially every zip code in the country. Until 1970, the Post Office Department provided banking services in its branches, providing an important tool of savings that dated from the Progressive Era. Over one hundred countries around the world offer a postal banking option. In addition to banking services, post offices could be augmented to provide rural broadband (not merely network extension but installation and repair consultations), health and wellness clinics, and claims processing for federal programs. Building upon our postal system would leverage existing infrastructure and provide rural benefits.

There are approximately 35,000 post offices in the United States, with just under 500,000 employees. Each office that adds banking services would add an employee or more. Transforming the post office into a local service provision agency would offer the opportunity for the creation of tens of thousands, if not hundreds of thousands, of jobs.

Preschool, Pre-kindergarten and childcare for all. Americans have been confronting the reality that many jobs in our rapidly evolving society require an education beyond that provided by the K-12 system. Proposals for a vocationally-focused 13th and 14th grade have emerged, whether through reformed public school systems or through community college and vocational school expansion. In the other direction, pre-kindergarten and pre-school programs have important precedents in Head Start and have been shown to bring a wide range of social, economic, and cultural benefits. As the economist Randy Albelda has argued, programs like these, as well as expanded child-care and after-school options, can augment parents’ ability to participate in the labor force while also delivering educational benefits to their children as students. Important educational and non-economic by-products would include better student-to-teacher ratios, augmented tutoring, and increased student services.

Infrastructure and the Green New Deal. Important proposals for a Green New Deal – a series of programs that invest heavily in the renovation and transformation of our energy infrastructure and prepare the country for the energy revolution in wind and solar power – have been written about elsewhere. Yet direct government employment on the model of the Civil Works Administration, Works Progress Administration, and the Civilian Conservation Corps would efficiently and robustly serve the ends of environmental economic transformation in the United States. Jobs could include solar panel installation for existing buildings as well as new panel grid installation, windmill installation, white roof installation, and concomitant investments in energy storage. A system that complemented the repair of the federal highway system could install new networks of electric charging stations across the country, including in urban and rural areas.

As the example of Vermont shows, “clean energy” and “green energy” investment has the potential to create thousands upon thousands of living-wage jobs that span a range of skills. Solar energy has begun to provide more jobs than fossil fuel companies in the United States. With the impending downturn in oil and gas hiring, and with the continuing downturn in coal-related employment, important investments in these areas would provide jobs in the energy industry just as they are drying up elsewhere.

Construction and conservation work, including the Great Lakes, rivers and oceans. Massive job losses are occurring in states and communities that depend heavily upon water, whether the Atlantic or Pacific Coasts, the Gulf of Mexico, the Great Lakes, or America’s many river systems that are crucial for transport. Jobs available include rivers and harbors construction and conservation, toxic waste mitigation, invasive species mitigation, and coastline construction to prepare for rising ocean levels.

Job training and education. Every kind of job imagined here will require labor supply adjustments. The federal government used to have expansive job training programs such as the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act created in 1973 and the Job Training Partnership Act that followed it. Studies of these programs were mixed on their efficacy, but Congress could create new programs or directly fund state universities and community colleges to do so. The key here is that completion of a job training program should come with the assurance of a productive job with at least a living wage at the end.

State elections administration and voter registration. Election administration in the United States rests at the level of state government, and this capacity, too, has withered. Direct government employment programs would be used to strengthen the administration of motor-voter laws, provide non-volunteer poll workers, supply workers to increase the registration of minority populations, make voting more accessible for the elderly as well as the young, and provide nonpartisan information to empower urban and rural citizens alike to vote.

Investing in Indian Country. An expansion of hiring by the Bureau of Indian Affairs could directly employ tribal members to work on Indian reservations throughout the United States, in positions ranging from health and education to conservation and infrastructure. Such an expansion would help the United States government meet the needs of a non-white population that is now fast-growing but which remains highly impoverished and often left aside from both economic innovation patterns and social welfare programs that target urban concentrations.

Legislative and regulatory capacity. Although it won’t be the source of millions of jobs, America’s Article One branch has seen its capacity wither in recent years, losing important analytic capacity with the downsizing of the Government Accountability Office, the Congressional Research Service, the Congressional Budget Office and the elimination of the Office of Technology Assessment. Committee staffs have also declined. As a result, a bipartisan, cross-spectrum network of observers has called for a reinvestment in congressional capacity. Such a reinvestment will be all the more important if any kind of direct government employment program comes to pass, as the dispensation of funds and working conditions must be overseen by the people’s representatives.